Someone gave me a Mac iBook G4. Of course my first thought was to install sme kinda Linux. I never tried Linux on a PowerPC machine before.

I looked at various thread here and they helped me in choosing what distros to try.

I got various distros to install, mostly Ubuntu based. The server installs went fine but not very exciting. Anything desktop installs and seems to work well, then when something asks very much of the system, it locks up tight. Ubuntu Mate 16.04 seemed to work nicely until the crash. I can do a few things before it happens, anyone have any idea what setting I could change to make it happier?

None of the existing threads appear to address this crashing issue.

Thanks all.

I wonder if this is an effect of planned obsolescence? I got rid of both my two G4s because of random lockups after trying different RAM sticks didn't help, and HDs passed all tests.

I suppose that is possible. I wondered maybe about a driver issue such as video or WiFi.